We investigated how the perception of Dutch whispered boundary tones depends on the presence of an accent in the utterance-final word, i.e. the boundary tone landing site. Listeners performed near ceiling in normal speech, whereas the same listeners’ performance dropped about 30% in whisper, while processing speed decreased in whisper compared to normal speech. Accent position furthermore influenced boundary tone perception. Initial-stress words showed a question bias that affected recognition of that speech act when accent and boundary tone did not coincide. On final-stress words, in which boundary tone and accent coincided, statements and questions were identified equally well.
Cite as: Heeren, W., Heuven, V.v. (2014) The interaction of accent and boundary tone in perception of whispered speech. Proc. Speech Prosody 2014, 398-402, doi: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2014-67
@inproceedings{heeren14_speechprosody,
author={Willemijn Heeren and Vincent van Heuven},
title={{The interaction of accent and boundary tone in perception of whispered speech}},
year=2014,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2014},
pages={398--402},
doi={10.21437/SpeechProsody.2014-67}
}